Radio and Weather Statistics for February 2014

February 2014 has continued wet with many floods across the country.

My radio and weather statistics for January are as follows:

Radio Operation

Total number of contacts: 34

Modes

JT65:  34

A poor month again for radio operation, not much time to get on.

Weather

Total rainfall for the month: 132mm

Average temperature: 6.6 degrees centigrade

Maximum temperature of 12.9 on the 24th February at 14.34
Minimum temperature of 1.7 on the 28th February at 00:57


The weather during the month has again been very wet and windy with a succession of low pressure areas running from the Atlantic across the country. As can be seen from the minimum temperature being above freezing point it has also been a mild month.

A Cloud Free Day - Satellite Picture of Flooding

Sunday was a rare day of sunshine and clear blue skies. The weather satellite pictures received via EUMETCast showed the UK in a rare state of being almost cloud free.

The following picture shows the UK from a Metop AVHRR pass.

© EUMETSAT (2014)

It is not really clear from the above picture, but when viewed on a large screen, flooding along the River Thames and the Somerset Levels stands out very well.

I took the following detail from the above picture. This shows the Somerset Levels area with the extensive flooding clearly visible. It will be interesting to compare this with a picture later in the year when hopefully the area has dried out.

© EUMETSAT (2014)

 

After the storm overnight Friday into Saturday, the weather has improved, although still some rain, not as heavy as previous weeks.

 

JT65 Activity on 10m

The 10m band has been very good recently with plenty of JT65 activity.

Have not had much time for radio recently, however did get an hour yesterday evening and put out a call on 10m using the JT65 mode.

Worked the following stations in an hour:

KI0QS
WB0IKF
W9TLG
LU4WAP
W9MDB
KM6CQ
KB1O
KF7GMV
N8BIF

Plenty of stations on from North and South America and very difficult to find any free space on the JT65 frequency.

Did not get a chance to try out SSB on 10m. The Windom antenna had blown down in the rceent strong winds, so the Inverted L which I usually use on the FT2000 was connected to the TS2000 which is set up for data modes.

A Conveyor of Low Pressure Areas

So far this year, we have seen a succession of low pressure areas come across the Atlantic straight for the UK, dumping large amounts of rainfall and inflicting very high winds across the country.

Rainfall has been heaviest in the south of the country with heavy flooding in Somerset and across the Thames Valley.

The cause appears to be the jet stream stuck further south and flowing faster than usual, generating a conveyor belt of fast moving, intense low pressure areas.

I had a look through the NOAA APT satellite pictures I have received for the last few weeks and picked out a series of pictures that give an indication of this weather pattern

They all show intense low pressure areas tracking over the UK.

 NOAA 19 - 1st February 2014

NOAA 19 - 7th February 2014

NOAA 19 - 8th February 2014

NOAA 19 - 12th February 2014

The last picture from the 12th February brought very strong winds to the west and north of the country with gusts in excess of 100MPH.

We have yet another low pressure area tracking across the country through today and overnight bringing rain and gale force winds. There was too much noise on the NOAA 19 midday picture from today. The cross dipoles I use to received APT transmissions are located in the loft of the house. We have a large number of tall trees to the south and what with the rain and thick cloud, I suspect this combines to impact the signal received from the satellite.

Radio and Weather Statistics for January 2014

January 2014 has been a terrible month with so much rain that here in the south of the UK it has been the wettest January on record.

My radio and weather statistics for January are as follows:

Radio Operation

Total number of contacts: 18

Modes

JT65:  12
SSB:   6
A poor month for radio operation, not much time to get on.

Weather

Total rainfall for the month: 177mm

Average temperature: 6 degrees centigrade

Maximum temperature of 11.9 on the 6th January at 00:22
Minimum temperature of -1.9 on the 12th January at 05:03

Frost days: 4

The weather during the month has been very wet and windy with a succession of low pressure areas running from the Atlantic across the country.

Raspberry Pi NTP Server

I run a number of applications such as WSPR which require accurate timing. PC clocks are very poor at keeping accurate time and rather than rely on an internet time source, I have run my own NTP server based on a Garmin GPS unit for some years. This is connected to a computer running Windows XP which takes the GPS data and the PPS signal to provide a very accurate time.

As this system is now many years old, I have been looking for an alternative solution and found a build using a Raspberry Pi and a GPS.

I have also been wanting to play with the Raspberry Pi so this looked like an ideal project, so I ordered the parts last week and completed over the weekend.

I must make clear that none of this is my own original work. I followed the instructions and downloads from:

David Taylor at this link: http://www.satsignal.eu/ntp/Raspberry-Pi-NTP.html#trimble

The download and information from: http://ntpi.openchaos.org/downloads/ and http://ava.upuaut.net/?p=612

And the GPS add-on board from here: http://ava.upuaut.net/store/index.php?route=product/product&path=59_60&product_id=95

I would like to thank them for the information, downloads and GPS board they have made available to create an incredibly simple to construct and cheap NTP server.

The first stage was connecting the GPS board to the Raspberry Pi. This was simply a matter of plugging the two units together using the GPIO pins. An antenna is then connected to the GPS board.

The following photo shows the Raspberry Pi with the GPS board added:

The add on GPS board is at top left with the cable attached to the GPS antenna.

After downloading the image, this was written to a new SD card using Win32DiskImager.

The SD card was inserted in the Raspberry Pi, power connected and the system came up and running as an NTP server.

To monitor time on my computers I use NTP Time Server Monitor by Meinberg. The following picture shows the Time Server Monitor screen on one of my PCs:

!92.168.1.85 is the new Raspberry Pi NTP server and 192.168.1.5 is the original NTP server on the Windows XP machine.

Really remarkable how simple it was to put this project together and my thanks to those who had put together the image, instructions and made available a compatible GPS board for all this to work so easily.

Also a good start with the Raspberry Pi, a remarkable little computer which seems to offer no end of possibilities for building simple applications to perform specific functions.

QSL Cards from the Bureau

Received a batch of QSL cards in the post last week for my MQ5LMY and MO5LMY call signs celebrating the Queen's Jubilee and the Olympics in 2012.

 
If your call is amongst them, many thanks for sending the card. My special event QSL cards were sent to the bureau at the start of last year so hopefully you have received mine.

Birdbox Webcam

Yesterday was one of those rare days at the moment where we had some dry weather, so I took the opportunity to clean out the birdbox at the side of the house and make sure the camera was set up and working.

There was a Blue Tit nest in the box last year which was reasonably successful in that some of the chicks fledged. I try and get the box ready around Christmas as birds start looking for nesting sites at the start of the year if the weather is reasonably mild.

The following picture shows the box mounted next to the side of the house.

The box on the side houses the connecting block between the cables leading to the computer and the camera.

The camera is this small CCTV camera from Henry's mounted on the lid of the box facing down. I have also included a white LED in the box which is always on to add some light.

The camera is cabled to one of my Shed Computers which runs CamUniversal from Crazypixels.

CamUniversal is configured for motion detection, comparing pictures every 5 seconds and saving pictures if there is a change. This ensures that any activity in the box is captured. CamUniversal is also configured to save a picture every 60 seconds. This is then uploaded to my monitoring web site so I can check any build up of activity and whether nesting has started.

The weather today has been a significant improvement on recent weeks with plenty of sunshine and this seems to have prompted some immediate inspections of the birdbox. Checking the folder which holds pictures taken when motion is detected I found a number with a bird checking out the box. See the following as an example:

Hopefully nest building may start soon and I shall have another successful nest in 2014.

If you want to check what is happening, the 60 second snapshot can be found here.

Weather Report: Continuing Stormy Weather

The stormy weather continues. Heavy rain, hail and winds again today with a low pressure area to the north of Scotland resulting in fast moving heavy belts of rain moving across my location in the south of England.

NOAA APT pictures continue to provide good views of the weather moving across the UK. The early morning and mid to late afternoon satellite passes are still to dark due to the low elevation of the sun at this time of year, however the passes around midday work well.

The above picture is from the NOAA 19, 13:07 pass and clearly shows the low pressure area to the north of Scotland and the stream of showers being fed from the Atlantic over the southern half of the UK.

Just before this pass, there was an intense storm at my location with heavy hail, rain and wind. The following graph is the temperature reading from my "computer shed" and shows the sudden drop in temperature at the onsite of the storm.

 

The drop is shown just after 12:00. the storm passed through in an hour.

Lots of flooding in the south west of England and along the south coast.

Aerials still holding up with no damage. Still more to come over the weekend !

Weather Update: A Rare Break In The Rain

A rare day of clear sky and no rain although this is forecast to change later this evening with heavy rain and strong winds returning.

The following is the NOAA19 APT picture received early this afternoon and shows the cloud that produced yesterday's rain over central Europe and Scandinavia with the next low pressure area and cloud bringing this evening's and tomorrow's rainfall to the west, approaching from the Atlantic.

This has been the pattern for most of the last few weeks with a continuous series of low pressure areas spreading across the UK from the Atlantic bringing heavy wind and rain.

The ground is water logged and rivers running very high with localised flooding. The following photo is the Blackwater River not far from my home location.

The river is more than twice the size of normal and is very fast flowing. When I took this photo, the water had receded as the ground around the river had flooded and was still covered in many places.

So far, no aerial damage. The new M0CVO HW-40HP aerial I put up just before Christmas is working well and providing there are no more branches falling from the trees supporting the aerial it should be fine.

Radio and Weather Statistics for 2013

Well, the end of another year and some statistics from my radio operation during 2013 and from the M5LMY weather station:

Radio Operation

Total number of contacts: 978

Modes

JT65:  710
SSB:   229
PSK31: 39

Weather

Total rainfall for the year: 713mm

Average temperature: 9.5 degrees centigrade

Maximum temperature of 31.9 on the 13th July at 15:30
Minimum temperature of -4.2 on the 22nd January at 03:27

The weather at the end of the year has been very wet and windy with a succession of low pressure areas running from the Atlantic across the country. December alone had 105.4mm of rainfall.

January is starting the same with so far 9mm of rain.